Look, maybe I'm just nit-picking, as an old philosopher who likes to use words in relatively well-defined senses, but these problems -- and they are serious problems -- are *not* symptoms of fascism.
One guy gets into trouble over a Web site. A bunch of people have trouble getting onto planes. Some police give trouble to some activists. All very sad, serious, inexcusable occurrences which should be resisted and fought as vigorously as possible.
But the scale of these events (and you could and should add in the harassment of Arab-Americans, residents of the US from Arab/Muslim countries, etc.) doesn't begin in the slightest to approximate the situation in the '30s in Germany, Italy, Japan, and other countries. These were the situations which are paradigm cases of fascism, which I believe should be the basis of any reasonable definition of the term.
They were "police states" in the proper sense of the term -- countries in which police and security organizations were not only given full rein to do their worst, without any control or oversight which most students of political theory would consider democratic, by a "party" which was in fact a cult of fanatics giving absolute obedience to a "supreme leader" (or in the Japanese case, a small coterie, acting in the name of the Emperor -- and with the Emperor to some extent actually leading them, though not to the extent that Hitler and Mussolini did). They were also countries in which the security organizations in fact took advantage of that license to destroy any possible opposition to the "leader" and his cult, so that the minority of left-minded folks who were motivated to act in opposition were rendered completely or almost completely ineffective. (It is not generally recognized that in Germany, for example, there were very small groups throughout the whole Nazi period who made efforts to organize workers in the traditional union manner, outside the Nazi labor organization mechanism, and who tried to sabotage war production, get Gestapo prisoners released, etc. But they couldn't become large enough or link up to do anything effective.)
There have been local areas, and specific periods, in American history which somewhat resembled this picture in one respect or another. Indiana in the '20s, when the KKK was very influential, the whole South during Jim Crow, the FBI in the '60s when it was running the Cointelpro program -- these are some examples. But constitutional authority never broke down entirely over the whole country even in the worst of these times, so it was eventually possible, with a lot of struggle in many cases, to reverse course. That is why I maintain that the US, *as a country,* is not and never has been "fascist" in any reasonable precise sense of the term.
The thread on leftist books like Zinn's becoming best-sellers is what is important now. Could you imagine a German Zinn's "History of the German People" selling as well *during the Nazi period* -- or even being published? Could an e-mail list like this one (assuming the existence of the Internet in the '30s and '40s) have operated, or the hundreds or thousands of other oppositional media that are now operating? Was there a party besides the Nazi party in which a German Howard Dean (not that he's a saint, and not that the Democrats are a party of saints) stood a chance of being nominated? Or an actual election (even with as flawed a system as our Electoral College) a year away?
Of course not. That's why we're not in a "fascist state" by a long shot. It's certainly a struggle, and not an easy one, to make our opposition felt, but at least we have a chance to do it today. Calling our present situation "fascist" or even "neo-fascist," whatever that is supposed to mean, is precisely the wrong thing to do, because it encourages defeatism. It tells folks who might want to joint the fight to defeat Bush, Ashcroft, the Patriot Act, etc., and get these bastards back under control, that there's no hope -- that they'd better keep quiet, or pack their bags and flee the country, before it's "too late."
Could it become too late in the foreseeable future? "Could it happen here?" Maybe, but I would bet that Americans are basically too individualistic, too hard to organize, for that to happen. That is very frustrating for leftists who yearn for a really hard-hitting, Marxist-Leninist style party, but fortunately it's also frustrating for rightists yearning for a fascist one.
Then, again, of course, I can't predict the future any better than anyone else, so who knows?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile